The problem: being colonised. I read two days ago in The Age that in ever-modernising Singapore, where the atmosphere is not that of a swamp, the mosquito Aedes Aegyptii has found itself new places to breed dengue fever beyond the fine tarmac and the regularly-painted walls of the apartment buildings. Australians may not like it, but dengue is endemic in parts of Queensland: my mother’s cousin died of it in 1926, and new cases occur on and off. Societies ignore or tolerate colonists till their bad baggage is unpacked. Migratory birds carrying avian flu are the latest bearers of the colonial message of conflicting interests. Our point of view makes them ever-arriving colonists; though of course really it was we who just put ourselves in their age-old path.

Yes, metaphors are slippery. Still, as in this example, colonisation is not just “something in the atmosphere”. If it takes, if it keeps coming, if it survives and stays, that proves it’s organic, it partakes of the nature of its hosts, it becomes symbiotic with its bearers. It lives on and with them; they adjust. For four years I re-visited Chennai, and I was astonished to find myself taking part in sing-songs – every English singalong song from the last hundred and twenty years - of a kind that’s ceased in the Australia I know. Those sentimental people, some of them saving and planning to send their sons and daughters off on the latest westernising (or is it globalising) migration to Silicon Valley, certainly needed de-colonising! But who would ban sing-songs round the piano? – vicarious memories of English music-hall, English pops and drinking-songs, in a place where the brigandage of empire washed over leaving the magnificent decaying railway-system, post offices, English public school educations, and people from both sides with more of the other in them than they knew. Those were songs they’d sung with their parents; there were challenges as to who remembered most items of the repertoire. This was culture that had achieved something more than resident status.

What kind of political tool do we want words to be? Weeder, poison-spray, gun, a wrecker’s ball – or a shovel, a brickie’s awl, a crane lowering walls into place?  Decolonisation, the deed complete, is rather rare – even by massacre. Are we really talking eradication, are we ready for construction from scratch?

We know that removing the experience, the organic memory, of an infection leaves us more vulnerable to it if it returns. Our organism is better off retaining something of the pest. That way, we and it are not rid of one another, but our bodies know more and are safer. The de-colonising manoeuvre taken thus looks more like recognition, consciousness of the scourge, an ability to deal with it strategically. Even habitually.

More metaphor: Peace-building. A good idea, that. If you regard peace as simply an interval, a rest-day, the time when war goes on strike, you make war sound normal. Peace becomes a lack of exertion and energy – a gap. And “Peace-keeping” sounds like nursing a patient who might break out or break down. Or curatorial – working with decimated species in an animal sanctuary.

Being humans and writers, we makes things.. The word for writers, in Greek and in Scots, means makers. Yes, let’s make, let’s build peace. 

To find the power in words, to avoid being overpowered, we need to think carefully of the way words persuade and build visions. We all meet words that are ineffective tools — used without precision, untargeted. Like much well-intentioned repetitious lobbying over the internet, admonishing the conscience of the reader. Generally the reader is safe from such persuasion – as with the waning pull of well-known advertisements.

What we respond to, the ground where power is in fine balance, is the gift of the person. Personal authorship and performance – when the story is the teller, and there is answering to be done - a relationship. When an author I’m reading sets no value on company at the feast, I switch off. .

You can drive a long way with two drivers. Swapping and sharing, you re-live stories, and you build more than stories. Not by a crash-course in somebody else’s literature – that’s force-feeding.

The Spanish word for “enjoy” took off in the US after 1960. I was always taught as a child that you enjoy something. That the English verb is transitive and couldn’t be used otherwise. But Spanish speakers ditched the cumbersome necessity for finding an object. “Goza,” they said. Enjoy. One language teaching another. Take it easy. Have fun. This isn’t a military order or an invoice. It is the leisurely gift, savouring, and the courtesy of reception. Not overpowering; empowering instead. 

What stories empower? Aborigines have secret stories and not-so-secret. The secret stories are told only to those greatly trusted, those fit for the authority of knowledge.. Let’s push on and get to telling our secrets. Let’s give our real and intimate fears and joys. In the pattern of fabric. In our favourite foods. In our feelings about our dearest: our parents, our children, our friends. Let’s tell jokes, explain why they’re jokes. Why our poetry is poetry. Let’s remember that the hand is never more powerful than when it “does” nothing: simply touches or strokes, 100% hand. That the tone of a voice can tell us as much as many sentences of close reasoning.

In her newspaper column, Helen Daniel remembered a traveller who realised that a Japanese photographer made him look Japanese. And cultural saturation achieves a similar transformation: after four months walking the streets in a foreign country, facing its faces, and bodies carried differently, you turn to a shop-window – and see an alien, a ghost, a ridiculous creature walking wrong. But you probably are changed, too, and when you get home you need time to return from the you who visited, and went part of the way to the facial habits, the presentation, of another society. Sharing is written in stance, movements, voice – and the perceiving eye and mind, too.

Let’s not be too parochial take in stories of other cultures. And transaction demands translation.  We need translating groups, cross-cultural publishing houses. There is the particular joy of savouring subtleties in our own language. But the strongest political tool is the meal we savour together, the sorrows and the fun in the language of even the people whom national politics clothes in the dress of fear and strangeness, ready for enmity.

Judith Rodriguez